Why I Write (or, I May Have a Footnote Problem)

Well, right now I’m writing this to avoid typing up what I wrote this week, because I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to fix it yet. I could be wrong about that; if I actually sat down and started the gears might start to turn and things might start to move in my brain: woo-hoo, genius at work! Or not, and it would be all hacking at bedrock with a fork. Which is what this week has been, writing-wise. This week was, in fact, a week where I might be within my rights to ask the Universe why the hell I do this. And so.

Okay, so here’s a story: I had a year–1995-1996 or so, the year between graduating college and getting into and starting grad school–that, for a very long time, I mentally dismissed as a year I didn’t write. I finished one story, and it was really bad. Then somewhere in around 2005, same thing, except I didn’t have the bad finished story. Both of those years have things in common: depression, anxiety, jobs I wasn’t happy in, the feeling that my life had gone off in a direction I Did Not Want and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back; setbacks and scariness and all around dark periods.

2006/2007 also included my pregnancy, during which I actually considered just … not being a writer anymore. Because in my pregnancy-hormone-addled brain, that made perfect sense.[1] But those Lost Years (if you will) always came to an end, and I’d write again. But hold on, that’s not the point …

So you have a baby, and you go back to work, and one day you look around and think that maybe you should seriously clean your office, right? Because there are a lot of old lesson plans and story drafts and just a lot of paper piling up, and you’d like to not lose your now-toddling child under the inevitable avalanche. Maybe you should buy a filing cabinet like an actual, paper-hoarding adult.

Of course, that means you actually have to file things.

I remember sitting in the middle of my office floor, child entertained by his grandmother and great-grandmother in the living room,[2] and in my lap, my hands, scattered around me on the floor were things that, if my grasp of my own history was correct, shouldn’t have existed: a long, long re-telling of Cinderella from 1995; an attempt to re-write a story I’d done as a freshman in college, dated 2005. About 80 pages of a young adult novel, three first drafts of some inter-related short stories, another 20-30 pages of a fantasy novel,[3] some poetry–all of it from those years when I honestly thought I hadn’t been writing. None of it was finished, mind you, but all of it was written. By me.[4]

So I think the reason I write is because, apparently, I’m not particularly good at not writing.

As for, like, philosophical reasons–I used to write because I wanted to be a voice of a generation,[5] or because Art, or to make people’s lives better, or to prove myself to people …

I can pinpoint the moment when I started writing with one ear toward what someone else thought I (actually our entire workshop) should write. This mostly came out in huge amounts of defensiveness–I was writing X, but it was literary X! I would change the face of X genre forever![6]

I can also pinpoint the moment when I decided to just fuck off and write the things that were fun. [7] (Fun that tries to kill me, occasionally, but fun.) The fun things make my brain feel good. The fun things have worlds I like to spend time in. The fun things tend to involve my thinking, I wonder if I could pull that off? and then, you know, seeing if I can. And the fun things have been, for the most part, better-written.

I knew something was up when Jason told me how much he liked this new, weird turn I’d taken. I really knew I was onto something when the husband started asking me if he could read my drafts. [8] And while I’m not wildly successful,[9] I started selling things when I started writing the fun stuff.[10]

So I think, then, that I write what I write because I like it, and it’s fun.[11] And, really, if I’m going to do it anyway–since apparently I can’t not–and if I can’t control the vagaries of publishing, I may as well entertain myself.[12]

1[back]Fast-forward to 2007, when the flip side of that happened and I thought that three months into parenting was the perfect time to start a novel.

3[back]The concept of which I still really think is cool, might I just say.

4[back]This is why I started dating whatever I wrote in my notebooks, and why I track word counts mark the days that I write in a calendar–because I need to remember that I am, actually, writing, and writing consistently.

6[back]I have lost a lot of writing time over the years to a variety of things; trying to simultaneously write what I wanted to while making it “respectable” was exhausting, as was the defensiveness, and I really wish I could get that time back.

The Dreaded Bio

I read (you can check out my Goodreads if you want).

I write (I’ve been published in Cicada, On Spec, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, GigaNotoSaurus, Penumbra eMag, and Betwixt; the stuff that’s available online for reading or purchase is linked below).

I plan for the inevitable zombie apocalypse and welcome the coming of the gorilla revolution. Or the anarchist rabbits. Whichever happens first.